The Time of My Life: What Boomers and Other Kids Should Know, by a Guy Old Enough to Be Their Dad

By Jerome M. Zaslow

Jerry was told that this would be a great book for baby boomers: It is a story of its timelate in the Great Depression, World War II, postwar America, how Jerry and his brothers grew their fathers business as well as Jerrys philosophy of life and its impact on his family and career.

His midlife adventures included becoming an athlete at the age of 51 without ever participating in sports prior to that time. This story of ambition and unwavering determination to succeed against all odds is evident from the beginning to the end of this inspiring account of an average young man who was determined to make something of himself, come hell or high water.

With his dogged determination and drive, Jerry completed the NY City Marathon, at the age of 53; the first of 14 marathons that included eight NYC marathons, four Boston Marathons, one Marine Corps Marathon and one London Marathon. According to Jerry, one doesnt attain their adulthood until age 65.

At the age of 84, Jerry recovered from a broken pelvis and hip to walk without a cane within five months. In fact, with the blessing of his orthopedic surgeon, he is gradually getting back into running.

He relinquished his position as president and CEO of the family business to his eldest daughter, Janet, in 2006. Jerry currently works full time as Chairman of the Board. He is also the companys Senior Negotiator and Chief Strategist at the age of 85.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456743406

Jerome M. Zaslow

Jerome M. Zaslow (Jerry) is a native Philadelphian who graduated from South Philadelphia High School for Boys in 1943. He never expected to attend college but a young salesman employed in his fathers linen & curtain shop advised Jerry to attend college even if you never use it. Jerry sought the advice of his mother who dropped out of high school at age 14. She said, ok, if you want to go, and suggested the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania because her father, an immigrant tailor, had a customer who was a professor at Wharton and was such a nice man. Jerrys 4 year Wharton education was completed in 7 year-round semesters and he graduated in October, 1945 at the age of 20 whereupon he joined the family business, founded in 1931 by his father, Irving. Jerry changed the business model in 1952 to a wholesale textile bid business that catered to government agencies and institutions, worldwide. The company name was changed to ATD-American Co. (ATD) when business & institutional office furniture was added to the product line. Later, law enforcement products were included and the day after 9/11, ATD acquired 104 year old Thomaston Mills, the last textile company in the U.S. manufacturing bedsheets and pillow cases. In February of 2008, ATD acquired Adirondack Direct, a $20,000,000 furniture catalog company that focuses on the church, school & business markets. Currently, ATD, with 200 valued employees, is approaching the $100,000,000 mark and its mission is to grow. Janet Wischnia, a Drexel University MBA and Jerrys oldest daughter, is President and CEO of ATD while Jerry is Chairman of the Board and Chief Strategist. Jerry and his wife, the former Anne Kalcheim, live in Jenkintown, PA. They have three married daughters and eight grandchildren.

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© 2011 Jerome M. Zaslow. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 06/27/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-4340-6 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-4341-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-4342-0 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011903857

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Table of Contents

Foreward By Lee Kalcheim, Emmy Award Winning Playwright

Acknowledgments

Chapter One South Street

Chapter Two My Father: Zaslavsky . . . Beyond Glory

Chapter Three Any Ice Today, Lady: The Peddlers of South Street

Chapter Four Annie

Chapter Five South Street and Broad and Olney

Chapter Six Wharton

Chapter Seven The Institutional Business

Chapter Eight The Weaker Sex: The Biggest Con Job in History

Chapter Nine Annie’s Death

Chapter Ten The Love of My Life

Chapter Eleven The Growth of ATD 1952 Onward

Chapter Twelve My Mother’s Death

Chapter Thirteen Running

Chapter Fourteen Zander . . . Blood is Thicker Than . . .

Chapter Fifteen Accidents Happen

Chapter Sixteen Traveling The World

Chapter Seventeen December 31, 1999 . . . The End of An Era

Chapter Eighteen Seventy-Seven Years Young

Chapter Nineteen The Best Is Yet To Come

Chapter Twenty The Future of ATD

Chapter Twenty-One If I Had to do it Over Again

Epilogue:

Appendix

Foreward By Lee Kalcheim

Emmy Award Winning Playwright

WHEN WE HEAR THE expression, Family Business most of us either think of a quaint mom and pop grocery store or conversely of some well known family venture like Warner Brothers Movie studio or some worldwide monoliths like the oil businesses run by the likes of the Rockefeller family. Do old fashioned, reasonably sized family businesses still exist?? Yes! Jerry Zaslow and his brothers and his large family have run a very successful one for 80 years. And still do.

It started with their father’s small dry goods store in South Philadelphia. When the boys joined the business, they saw an opportunity to expand into the wholesale end, and it grew and grew and grew, becoming ATD-AMERICAN CO. It now employs close to 200 people and includes 9 family members. That’s a family business. And the presence of relatives on the staff is only a part of what makes it so. Unlike most businesses, Jerry and his brothers encourage their employees to socialize. So much so that over the course of years, 20 marriages have taken place between couples who have met while working for ATD. Walking through their offices in suburban Philadelphia, one gets the sense of really being in a big family gathering. Jerry, an architectural maven, helped to design a large open space in a building complex that was once a stable/lumber yard/wrought iron foundry, that welcomes you and says, if you’re working for them, or doing business with them, Come, be a part of our family.

Now, of course, family businesses, like families, have their problems. If a family member is not doing his or her job, you can’t just up and fire them. You could be firing a son in law or a daughter. Or when your daughter takes over the business, she could be firing you. Also, you don’t leave the business at work. EVER. When Jerry was a young man, he’d not only bring his work home, he’d bring it on dates. I know. He was dating my sister. And when my young twin boys went out to dinner with Jerry and Anne, these two young students, violinists, who couldn’t have cared a bit about the world of business, would sit fascinated as Uncle Jerry regaled them with stories about his business. They knew, as I knew that here was a man who so loved his business and so loved his family that every word of his stories, every transaction, every deal was infused with passion that transcended our preconceptions of what a businessman was.

Here is a man whose family and his business fused. And both were the better for it. It’s a great story.

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK STARTED OUT as a series of essays about twenty years ago. The essays included recollections from my youth, business ideas, practices and philosophies that I experienced over 60 plus years of working in our family business. I was never an outstanding writer nor did I like to write during my formative years, but as I approached my seventies I got the urge to put some of the above on paper.

A couple of years ago, a friend, after reading my essays suggested that they would make an interesting book for the baby boomers.

So, after almost two years of re-writing and big time editing which primarily focused on my memoirs, I finally made it.

First, I want to thank Anne, my wife of fifty-four years and love of my life, my daughters Janet, Sara-Jean and Rebecca and my brothers Spencer and Arnold. Without them it would not have been as much fun. Thanks also to my editor Jane Cavolina and Mary Schnepp, my associate at ATD-AMERICAN CO., who conscientiously typed and re-typed the manuscript, what seemed like a thousand times.

I apologize for inadvertently leaving out anyone else who may have participated in my journalistic adventure. But if I did, please forgive me.

JMZ

Chapter One

South Street

AS YOU CAN TELL by my heavy breathing, I’m climbing the hills of the Wissahickon. I’m thinking about my father, the last few months of his life, as well as remembrances from my early youth. Like the path I’m climbing, I’ll let my memories take me wherever they lead.

My earliest memory of my dad was when I was about three or four years old. I was making too much of a ruckus, and I could tell that he was upset with me and left the house in a huff, annoyed by my tantrums and incorrigibility. Other than that instance, I don’t remember him paying too much attention to me. Mostly, I remember being in my mother’s care. My earliest recollection of my mother is her taking me to a meadow near Cobb’s Creek in West Philadelphia. I sat on the grass with her picking buttercups. I must have been three or four and she was probably less than thirty. I was about four when she took me to the Mastbaum Theater, between 18th and 19th and Market Streets in Philadelphia, to see Tom Sawyer with Jackie Coogan. Later, she also took me to see Skippy with Jackie Cooper, Wallace Beery, and Marie Dressler. Jackie Cooper was a couple of years older than I. A few years ago, I saw a rerun on TV of the Jackie Cooper movie. The last time I saw it was over seventy-five years ago . . . wow! It seems like yesterday.

My dad was a fighter, a plugger, a person who refused to surrender. One of his favorite sayings was They shall not pass, probably from the ancient Greek story of Leonidas. Surrender was not in his vocabulary. He had a very strong constitution, but he was still a worrier. He always saw the glass half empty. My mother always saw the glass half full. As my brothers and I grew older and more responsible, we offered moral support, helped him, and he became more relaxed and less stressed.

In 1931, during the dismal depths of the Great Depression, when I was six years old, my father started over in business probably with less than $500. We could no longer afford to maintain our row house in Southwest Philadelphia; dad had to give it up because he was about to default on the mortgage. We moved to a store at 520 South Street in Philadelphia, with living quarters upstairs. It was a three-story building with two front show windows that was rehabilitated just before we moved in. The hardwood floors of the living quarters on the 2nd and 3rd floors were refinished, looked and smelled like new. The building was approximately 22 x 60 and had a backyard that exited on Randolph Street where 10 to 15 impoverished black families lived. I still remember hearing my father pace the floor at night, which left an indelible mark on me.

I started first grade at the William Morris Meredith Elementary School at 5th and Fitzwater Streets. The school was about two or three blocks from our house and I had to cross Kater Street, Bainbridge Street, Passyunk Avenue and Monroe Street to get there. Annie Eason, our $10 per week housekeeper, and one of the few luxuries that my father bestowed upon my mother during the Great Depression, took me to school every day because my parents were concerned about my crossing the streets by myself. In those days the neighborhood was very ethnic and people were much more bigoted than they are today. Although I was about average size for my age, my parents were also concerned about my being attacked by tough neighborhood roughnecks and bullies, another reason for Annie to walk me. She got to know many of the schoolchildren, as well as the teachers. Now and then there was a fight in the schoolyard and usually Annie would get in the thick of it. She sometimes actually got the kids to mix it up while appearing to break up the fighting . . . She was quite a character.

We lived at 520 South Street for about a year. It was on the south side of South Street. At that time, the north side of the street catered primarily to the women’s retail trade. Our side had stores that catered primarily to men: men’s clothing, men’s shoes, furniture stores, men’s hats, a shoe repair shop, a leather and shoe findings wholesaler, hardware stores, a radio and appliance store, a bar and two delicatessens. The north side had women’s lingerie shops, women’s apparel shops, bridal shops, children’s apparel shops, toy stores, millinery shops, a juvenile furniture store, an optician and jewelry shop, a home furnishings store, and two 5 & 10 cent stores. The north side of South Street was sunnier than the south side of South Street and perhaps that is why the women’s trade gravitated to that side of the street. Naturally, there were a few exceptions, but in general that’s the way it was. Unfortunately, our women-oriented shop, where we sold bed sheets, pillowcases, towels, blankets, curtains, draperies, and other decorative household linens, was on the wrong side of the street, which compounded an already intense competitive situation.

My mother’s role in the business was mainly supportive. She had studied shorthand at Pierce Business School, and she was a stenographer when she married my father. She took dictation from my dad and typed business letters for him on an old L.C. Smith typewriter, which was probably World War I vintage or before. I remember when my mother manually typed our first Jaffe’s Art Linen list of specials in quadruplicate using blue carbon paper. I still have one of the original flyers.

Now and then, when all the salesmen were busy in the store (they were all men at that time), my mother would wait on a customer. She wasn’t a great saleslady . . . far from it . . . but she was very outgoing and kept the customers entertained and distracted until a salesman or my father was available. My mother knew something about the product lines, but not enough. She considered herself primarily a mother and homemaker. In her spare time she would stay in the store to give moral support to my dad and, when time permitted, talk to him about the everyday events of our family life.

I remember my father showing me how to fold bathroom rugs and towels when I was about eight years old. I stood by his side at the sales counter while he showed me how to do it so that the underneath ends of the towels and rugs would not overlap the top ends. He was very patient. I vividly remember the pride he took in teaching me this rudimentary task.

This was during the depths of the Great Depression and I vividly remember looking through the glass door at the entrance of the store while Annie was getting me ready to go to school. What I saw left an unforgettable impression that I can’t help but think of every day . . . penniless people eating out of our garbage can, which was set curbside for garbage truck pick-up.

Talk about poverty! Today, people have no inkling whatsoever what the masses went through during the 1930s. Kids getting donations for free knickers, shoes, and food handouts. There was 30% unemployment, and most households had no breadwinner. If you finally landed a job, the wages averaged about $10 a week.

After sweating it out on the south side of South Street for one year, in 1932 my dad was able to rent a store across the street with an apartment for $200 per month from Mrs. Lena Baum, who owned Baum’s Bridal Shoppe, where, in later years, the Painted Bride was founded. Our family moved to 513 during the early part of 1932 when I was close to seven years old.

The addresses where we lived and worked were important to us. We began at 520. Then we moved to 513. The numbers 5, 1, and 3 add to 9, and twice 9 equals 18, which is Chai (Life) in the Jewish tradition. In 1947, we added a branch store at 5615 North Broad Street, an address that contained two of the digits of our home address. We again expanded the business and moved to 526 South Street. 526 included two digits from the previous addresses. Later in life, Anne, my wife, and I moved to 315 S. Sterling Road in Elkins Park, 513 South Street in reverse. We moved the business to 135 Greenwood Avenue, and eventually moved our home to 1365 Red Rambler Road. We got to choose both those addresses, and I purposely selected them to tie in with our earlier addresses. I felt there was some mystical or prophetic significance.

My brother Spencer is two years younger than I, and Arnold is five years younger. When we were children we were very playful and mischievous and sometimes we would annoy my dad by running in and out of the store. 513 South Street was a three-story building, with 2 show windows for display. It was not in as good condition as 520 but it was on the sunny side of the street. The store was about 20 feet wide and 40 feet long with incandescent lights inside of ivory colored glass and clear crystal trimmed globes, one of which is currently hanging in my daughter, Janet’s ATD Greenwood Avenue office. Although our living quarters were on the second and third floors above the store, the kitchen was at the rear of the store. The living room and the dining room were at the rear of the second floor, and the front of the second floor was unoccupied, though it would later house part of the store. The rest of our modest apartment (if you can call it that) was on the third floor—my parents’ bedroom, a bedroom about the size of a walk-in closet for Annie, one bedroom for Spencer, Arnold, and me, a porch (eventually to become the living room), and a bathroom and laundry room in the rear, looking out on a small yard with one sickly tree. There was a basement, too, that was later used as a stockroom.

The living room contained my mother’s upright piano. At the top of the stairwell to the third floor was our playroom, a short L-shaped hallway. In my teens, this area became my darkroom when I became a photography buff. The room must have been only 3 feet wide and about 10 feet deep. I was a child when I played there and the room seemed a lot bigger than it actually was. If I were to go in that room today, I would just about be able to stand up straight.

In the intervening years, our dining room and living room became stockrooms, so eventually we had to live solely on the third floor, even though the kitchen was still on the first floor. We began to sell curtains and bedspreads in the unused portion of the second floor, which included a display area. Some sales were lost, however, because there were customers who were reluctant to climb the stairs.

After we moved to 8 Surrey Road in Melrose Park in 1947, our store commandeered the entire third floor as a warehouse and storage area. Eventually, the whole building became a selling and storage area for the business. The only area that remained of our former living quarters was the kitchen, where my father would rest or take a nap now and then.

My mother always said that she was glad to have had three sons. I don’t know if that was the whole truth. My wife, Anne, says she believes that my mother always wanted to have a daughter. I think parents sometimes say things to their children to enhance their self-esteem and to make them feel good. Knowing my mother, she would never admit that she wished for a daughter since I, as a son, may have felt that I was a disappointment to her.

I can tell you this: she certainly enjoyed and loved her granddaughters and gave them lots of attention. She used to take Janet into center city Philadelphia for walks and treats when she was four or five years old and she loved to buy her clothes. She would also take Sara-Jean into town to department stores and shops. She thoroughly enjoyed being a grandmother. I think this rubbed off on Anne, because she developed her own deep love and enjoyment for our eight wonderful grandchildren, possibly because of my mother’s example. Anne adores and dotes on our grandchildren, and enjoys every minute of being a grandmother. She welcomes babysitting, taking them places, and she loves to buy things for them. I am so happy for her.

My mother was very sensitive, as were all of the other Jaffes—sensitive in the respect that if she was annoyed, or if I said something out of line or hurt her feelings, I would certainly hear about it. When I was younger, I didn’t know how to deal with the female psyche, those things that differentiate women from men emotionally and psychologically. My dad was good at dealing with women, but I am still learning and, hopefully, making progress.

My mother used to say, Some listen, some don’t, meaning that some children listen, while others just don’t. My brothers and I must have grown up in a bygone era. We were trained properly in Victorian principals of parental respect and respect for our elders, or perhaps our parents were very lucky. It seems that 99 and 9/10ths of the time we listened to our parents’ counsel. Perhaps we listened because of my mother’s family experience, which I heard about at least fifty times. Her older brother, Joe, graduated from Central High School in 1907, and was also a member of the first graduating class at South Philadelphia High School for Boys in 1910. My mother used to tell us how her mother counseled and nagged Joe to become a schoolteacher because he was such a good student in high school, and very academically inclined. Probably because he may have been shortsighted, contrary, lacked confidence, or had low self-esteem, Joe didn’t take her advice. He said he wanted to get a job in the post office as a clerk because that job paid a few more dollars than teaching. The end result prompted my grandmother to say to the rest of her children, Some listen, some don’t. Joe wouldn’t listen, and remained a clerk for the rest of his life. After the post office job, he worked in a dry cleaning shop as a clerk writing sales receipts for clothes left to be cleaned . . . but that is another story. In later years, Joe often expressed his regrets to my mother and told her that his unwillingness to take his mother’s advice had adversely affected his life. Unfortunately, some people are their own worst enemy.

It has been said that one doesn’t grow up until age 65. Parents usually understand their child’s psychological make-up better than the child realizes. Many young people fail to comprehend that you generally have to be older to understand the complexities and the broad perspective of life, which develops into a mural impacted by the choices you make, both positive and negative. Some people make the right choices, some make wrong ones. When choices have to be made, a person should take a very broad, hard, and serious look ahead and say to themselves, Will this choice prove to be a good choice five years from now? Will it be to my advantage and benefit? Having not been on the planet long enough and lacking maturity, many young people cannot discern the difference between the short term fix and the long term cure. My mother tried hard to imbue us with these axioms.

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When I was about ten or eleven years old, I secured a route to sell magazine subscriptions. The names of the magazines were Delineator and Collier’s. Our neighbors were my prospects. I did not do well, since most people couldn’t afford subscriptions. So I tried to sell one copy at a time. Collier’s magazine was a nickel and Delineator was a dime. I tried to sell one of the magazines to our neighbors on the south side of South Street, who were in the wholesale leather shoe findings business. They made disparaging remarks about my efforts and wouldn’t subscribe. As a matter of fact, I don’t recollect selling any of the magazines. Eventually, the magazine distributor’s sales supervisor came to our store to collect the money and/or the old magazine issues. He came up to our apartment, where I had all the magazines stored in the playroom, and cut the mastheads off of the out-of-date magazines and gave me credit for them. That was the end of my magazine selling career.

Around that time, our family went to Atlantic City for the summer. We had rented the first floor of a two-story house on Teresa Place in Ventnor, NJ. Future summers were spent in a cottage on Parker Place. I think my dad paid $200 for the whole summer season. The cottage was owned by the Boehms, who lived on the ground floor of the house. My dad would come down on Saturday nights after the store closed and return to the store the following morning, unless somebody could replace my dad on Sunday, then he would go back to work on Monday morning. The store was open on Sundays despite the Blue Laws. South Street was probably the only street within a fifty-mile radius where you could shop on Sunday. Today, almost every store in the Philadelphia metropolitan area is open seven days and seven nights a week.

Sending us away from the city for the summer was financially difficult, but my dad was very kind and very considerate to my mother, my brothers, and me. He wanted us to have some of the better things in life, other than the toilsome battle-weary life we had on South Street. We went to the shore for about three or four years.

My dad sent me a letter on my tenth birthday explaining my responsibilities. It was on Jaffe’s Art Linens green stationery (green because it was the color of money). He wrote that now that I was a man, I had to set an example for my brothers, take care of my mother, and assume the responsibilities of the oldest son. I still have this letter, framed in my office in Wyncote. Here it is.

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My Dear Boy Jerry,

Today is your Birthday. Wish you the best of health and happiness and many good things to make a good bright